Today's society and economies increasingly rely on high-availability distributed computing systems and cloud computing to support high-speed transactions. Among the massive variety of information being exchanged using computer networks, transactions in particular must be handled reliably since they effect technological, or economic, or other tangible change upon which future actions and decisions will be based.
In recent years, high-speed transactions have been carried out in a number of different applications, including telecommunications (where carriers may process millions of transactions per second, such as call set-ups, handoffs, etc.), high-frequency trading of stocks or other securities (where nanosecond-scale latencies can have a substantial bearing), cloud-based online retail sales processing, audience voting systems, auctions, ticket sales, travel reservations and many others. In these kinds of applications, the requirement for reliability remains of critical importance, but speed and low-latency become equally important to stakeholders and system designers.
A practical solution is needed to enable transacting entities to conduct high-speed transactions by passing messages reliably but without having to bear the latency of conventional reliable message exchange protocols.